CRH 2018 : Workshop on Corpus-based Research in the Humanities (CRH) with a special focus on space and time annotations

Call For Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Corpus-based Research in the Humanities (CRH) with a special
focus on space and time annotations

Vienna (Austria) January 25-26, 2018

web: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ac/crh2/

The Workshop on "Corpus-based Research in the Humanities" (CRH) brings
together those areas of Computational Linguistics and the Humanities that
share an interest in the building, managing and analysis of text
corpora. The edition of this year has a specific focus on time and space
annotation in textual data, backed by a keynote speaker with special
interest in this aspect of corpus management.

The second edition of CRH will be held in Vienna (Austria) on January
25th-26th 2018 and will be hosted Austrian Academy of Sciences, University
of Vienna and Technische Universitaet Wien.

The series of the CRH workshops continues that of the workshop on
"Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities" (ACRH), the three
editions of which were held respectively in 2011 (Heidelberg, Germany), 2012
(Lisbon, Portugal) and 2013 (Sofia, Bulgaria). The first CRH was held in
Warsaw (Poland) in 2015.

Submissions of long abstracts for oral presentations and posters (with or
without demonstrations) featuring high quality and previously unpublished
research are invited on the following TOPICS:

- specific issues related to the annotation of corpora for research in the
Humanities (annotation schemes and principles), with special interest in
space and time annotations
- corpora as a basis for research in the Humanities
- diachronic, historical and literary corpora
- use of corpora for stylometrics and authorship attribution
- philological issues, like different readings, textual variants, apparatus,
non-standard orthography and spelling variation
- adaptation of NLP tools for older language varieties
- integration of corpora for the Humanities into language resources
infrastructures
- tools for building and accessing corpora for the Humanities
- examples of fruitful collaboration between Computational Linguistics and
Humanities in building and exploiting corpora
- theoretical aspects of the use of empirical evidence provided by corpora
in the Humanities

This year, CRH will have a SPECIAL TOPIC concerning time and space
annotation in textual data. Submissions with this focus are especially
encouraged.

Contributions reporting results from completed as well as ongoing research
are welcome. They will be evaluated on novelty of approach and methods,
whether descriptive, theoretical, formal or computational.

The proceedings will be published in time for the workshop. They will be
co-edited by Andrew Frank, Christine Ivanovic, Francesco Mambrini, Marco
Passarotti and Caroline Sporleder.

Motivation and aims
--------------------------------------
Research in the Humanities is predominantly text-based. For centuries
scholars have studied documents such as historical manuscripts, literary
works, legal contracts, diaries of important personalities, old tax records
etc. Large amounts of such documents exist and are increasingly available in
digital form. This has a potentially profound impact on how research is
conducted in the Humanities.
Digitised sources allowing scholars to analyse texts quicker and more
systematically.

Digital data can also be (semi-)automatically mined: important facts and
interdependencies can be detected, complex statistics can be
calculated. Analysis of locations and time in documents is often crucial to
understand and visualize trends. Results can be visualised and presented to
the scholars, who can then delve further into the data for verification and
deeper analysis.

Digitisation encourages empirical research, opening the road for completely
new research paradigms that exploit `big data' for humanities
research. Digitisation is only a first step, however. In their raw form,
electronic corpora are of limited use to humanities researchers. Corpus
annotation can build on a long tradition in (corpus) linguistics and
computational linguistics but the true potential of such resources is only
unlocked if corpora are enriched with different layers of linguistic
annotation (ranging from morphology to semantics, including location and
time).

The CRH workshop aims at building a tighter collaboration between people
working in various areas of the Humanities (such as literature, philology,
history, translational studies etc.) and the research community involved in
developing, using and making accessible different kinds of corpora. A gap
exists between computational linguists (who sometimes do not involve
humanists in developing and exploiting corpora for the Humanities) and
humanists (who sometimes just aren't aware that such corpora do exist and
that automatic methods and standards to build and use them are today
available).

Over the past few years a number of historical annotated corpora have been
started, among which are treebanks for Middle, Early Modern and Old English,
Early New High German, Medieval Portuguese, Ugaritic, Latin, Ancient Greek
and several translations of the New Testament into Indo-European
languages. The experience of these ever-growing set of projects can provide
many suggestions on the methodology as well as on the practice of
interaction between literary studies, philology and corpus linguistics.

Instructions for submissions
-------------------------------------------------
We invite to submit long abstracts describing original, unpublished research
related to the topics of the workshop as PDF. Abstracts should not exceed 6
pages (references included) and written in English.
Submissions have to be made via the EasyChair page of the workshop at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=crh2 (requires prior registration
with EasyChair).
The style guidelines can be found here:
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/forschung-institute/biblio/academiae-corpora/ac/crh2/authors-kit/.

Reviewing will be double-blind; therefore, the abstract should not include
the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web-sites, project
names etc. revealing the authors' identity. Furthermore, any self-reference
should be avoided. For instance, instead of "We previously showed (Brown,
2001)...", use citations such as "Brown previously showed (Brown,
2001)...". Each submitted abstract will be reviewed by three members of the
program committee.

Submitted abstracts can be for oral or poster presentations (possibly with
demo). There is no difference between the different kinds of presentation
both in terms of reviewing process and publication in the proceedings (the
limit of 6 pages holds for both abstracts intended for oral and poster
presentations).

The authors of the accepted abstracts will be required to submit the full
version of their paper, which may be extended up to 10 pages (references
included).

Presentations
-----------------------------
The oral presentations at the workshop will be 30 minutes long (25 minutes
for presentation and 5 minutes for questions and discussion).
Depending on the number of submissions, a poster session might be organised
as well.

Special social event
-------------------------------------
On the night of 25 January, the TU WIen organizes their TU-Ball at the
imperial Hofburg (http://www.tu-ball.at/en/home/). Participants may take
part in this unique festivity (details later). Do not miss such an
opportunity to participate in this highlight of the Viennese ball season!